Howt to create a CLI with Elixir?

[Exadra37]

@mmmrrr

I think escript is the way to go. For escripts it is important to remember that you need an Erlang installation on the target machine.

Mix releases doesn’t require an Erlang installation in the target, but requires that you build it to the target.

In other words you need to build the release in a machine with the same architecture of the target, and this is usually done with docker.

The tricky bit is that the target needs to have all the static linked dependencies required at runtime, like for example a compatible version of OpenSSL or any other your application may require.

So, building a CLI in Elixir is not hard, the problem is to distribute it, and not even Bakeware solves it as I mentioned here:

Spawnfest/bakeware: Compile Elixir applications into a single executable binary

From the repo: Creating cross-platform binaries Bakeware binaries include the Erlang runtime but there are still dependencies on the host system. These include the C runtime and other libraries referenced by the Erlang runtime and any NIFs and ports in your application. Luckily, the binary ABIs of many libraries are very stable, but if distributing to a wide audience, it’s useful to build on a system with older library versions. Python has a useful pointers in their packaging guides. If I a…

I would love to be proven wrong and be told that Bakeware indeed solves the issue like Go and Rust